Dastan - Amar Bel, by the feisty, subversive, radical feminist writer Ismat Chughtai, is a poignant, bittersweet tale of an older man married to a much younger woman whose beauty and abundant youth is a constant rebuke to his own decline into infirmity and old age.
Spotlight Forum presents Dastangoi | Amar Bel | Sunil Mehra and Pallav Mishra
Dastan - Amar Bel, by the feisty, subversive, radical feminist writer Ismat Chughtai, is a poignant, bittersweet tale of an older man married to a much younger woman whose beauty and abundant youth is a constant rebuke to his own decline into infirmity and old age. This will be prefaced by Badi Umr ki Biwi ke Fayadey, a short humorous piece by Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi, a world bank economist often called the James Thurber of Pakistan.
Artists
The Performers Sunil Mehra has worked as a staff writer, columnist, and editor for prestigious Indian newspapers and periodicals like The Times of India, The Indian Express, Pioneer, India Today and Outlook, and is based in New Delhi. He created and anchored Centre Stage for Doordarshan. His passion for literature and Urdu led him to Dastangoi. To date, he has performed to critical acclaim in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, London, and all over India. Pallav Mishra is a rising star on the Urdu poetry landscape: a leading young shaayar who has performed in mushairas across London and India. He works as an editor with Rekhta.
The Writer Ismat Chughtai (1915 - 1991) was an Indian Urdu novelist, short story writer, liberal humanist, and filmmaker. Beginning in the 1930s, she wrote extensively on themes including female sexuality and femininity, middle-class gentility, and class conflict, often from a Marxist perspective. With a style characterised by literary realism, Chughtai established herself as a significant voice in the Urdu literature of the twentieth century, and in 1976 was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.
